WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) — Hillary Clinton’s “dream” of a common market throughout the American hemisphere is a dystopian nightmare to many in this country.

This dream was featured in one of the excerpts from her paid speeches to financial institutions released last week by WikiLeaks. The Clinton campaign has not confirmed their authenticity, but has not denied it, either.

In fact, the excerpts were apparently contained in an email to Clinton campaign Chairman John Podesta as potential “land mines” for the candidate if they should ever become public.

The Clinton emails were overshadowed in the media by the leak on the same day of the now-infamous videotape of Donald Trump boasting in vulgar terms of his treatment of women, but they have been seized upon by the Trump campaign as evidence that Clinton’s new rejection of trade deals is a sham.

“My dream is a hemispheric common market, with open trade and open borders, sometime in the future,” Clinton said in a 2013 speech for Banco Itau of Brazil, “with energy that is as green and sustainable as we can get it, powering growth and opportunity for every person in the hemisphere.”

Well, what else are you going to say to a Brazilian bank audience?

Clinton has now taken license from none other than Abraham Lincoln, as portrayed in Steven Spielberg’s film “Lincoln,” to be entitled as a politician to say one thing in private and another in public.

OK, but which one is true? Both? Neither? Depends?

In a campaign where both Trump and Clinton’s rival for the Democratic nomination, Bernie Sanders, have galvanized millions of voters with their call to protect American jobs by rejecting trade deals that ship U.S. companies and jobs abroad, the answer is not unimportant.

Clinton’s enthusiastic support for the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) when it was signed, her initial praise of the Trans-Pacific Partnership as the “gold standard” of trade accords, and now this 2013 dream of a hemispheric common market make Sanders and Trump supporters understandably skeptical of her new “public” rejection of trade accords.

John Kass of the Chicago Tribune wondered this week if Clinton would explain what she meant with these remarks of a borderless Western hemisphere. “An America without borders? That’s not a dream, that’s a nightmare,” Kass wrote in the Tribune. “Ask the Europeans. They know.”

Cross-border trade with countries that benefit not only from low wages but government subsidies and substandard environmental and health protections is a major economic issue in this election. Immigration, ultimately, is also an economic issue, as porous borders allowing illegal immigration depress the U.S. labor market.

Trump has made it a theme of his campaign that without borders, there is no nation. While he says he is for “fair trade” or “smart trade,” he clearly has no use for a globalization that has helped destroy American manufacturing and turn whole regions in this country into a wasteland.

It is in fact this internal rift, or border, between a prosperous post-industrial economy on both coasts and an ailing agricultural and industrial sector in between that has given the populist message from Trump and Sanders such resonance.

And it is this divide, even if Trump’s character failings doom him to defeat in this election, which will lead to a new “war between the states,” Chapman University’s Joel Kotkin predicted this week.

Kotkin, an expert in economic geography, says the Electoral College map “reflects an increasingly stark conflict between two very different American economies.”

One, concentrated on the coasts and largely Democratic, he calls the “Ephemeral Zone,” because it deals primarily in digits and images, the movement of software, media and financial transactions. The other, mostly Republican, is the “New Heartland,” which produces tangible things like food, fiber and manufactured goods.

“It now encompasses both the traditional Midwest manufacturing regions, and the new industrial areas of Texas, the Southeast and the Intermountain West,” Kotkin writes in Real Clear Politics.

The debate over climate change, Kotkin continues, increasingly marks this divide, as the Heartland economy relies on fossil fuel while the digital society agitates for de-carbonization.

“Regulatory regimes that radically boost energy costs, as in California and New York, hasten de-industrialization,” Kotkin observes. “The rapid decline of areas such as interior California and upstate New York testifies what may be in store for the Heartland under a Hillary Clinton administration and a Congress controlled by the Democratic Party.”

Kotkin, who identifies himself as a Democrat-turned-independent, concludes that the Republican Party “is becoming something of a de facto populist party, based in the New Heartland, while the Democrats remain the voice of the coastal oligarchies who almost without exception back Hillary.”

In his view, Trump should and probably will lose, but that will not put an end to this divide. “The new war between the states will not end in November,” he says. “It will have hardly just begun.”

In short, there are more borders, internal and external, than meet the eye. While the WikiLeaks emails show the Clinton campaign floundering earlier this year to find a connection to voters, Trump identified his connection early and surged to the Republican nomination with it.

In this economic climate, Kotkin contends, Republicans could still make progress in this election, even with Trump at the top of the ticket likely to lose.

“Once Trump is gone,” he says, “there will be enough political will and money to mount a counter-offensive” against the blue-state digital economy.

Darrell
Delamaide

Darrell Delamaide is a political columnist for MarketWatch in Washington. Follow him on Twitter @MKTWDelamaide.

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